Earthweb takes a look at KDE 4 Beta saying that "Few major pieces of free software are more eagerly awaited than KDE 4". The article Touring the KDE 4 Beta covers most of the important changes in KDE 4 and concludes "[...] despite the complexity, to judge from the beta, KDE has a high chance of realising all the ambitions wrapped up in KDE 4."

Mr. Byfield says:
"If you want, you can still use Konqueror as a file manager, but much of that functionality has been removed, making it a much less cluttered application."

I heard that Konqueror will not be "dumbed down." So either he is wrong or it is "dumbed down."

He also says:
"At any rate, Dolphin, which has been in development several years, has always been far more powerful than Konqueror as a file manager, with not only a default directory tree pane, but the ability to split and merge panels and to offer some innovatively useful views, including an indexed one."

I have used Dolphin. It may be easier to use for your average user. Though I still consider Konqueror "more powerful." I think that the KDE devs have decided to keep Konqueror for "power users" and Dolphin for "average users."

Is this not so?

Also he talks much about KDE 4 and KDE 4 beta. So I think many people still don't get the point of KDE 4.0 and KDE 4.0 Beta.

>> I heard that Konqueror will not be "dumbed down." So either he is wrong or it is "dumbed down."

I think many things in Konqueror are broken at the moment. Otherwise I can't say what's been "removed". Maybe getting some love, thus reducing the "clutter".

>> I have used Dolphin. It may be easier to use for your average user. Though I still consider Konqueror "more powerful." I think that the KDE devs have decided to keep Konqueror for "power users" and Dolphin for "average users."

Really, I don't get why everyone thinks Dolphin is some kind of "you're too stupid to use Konqueror; here, have a go with Dolphin". Dolphin is a powerful file manager, but Konqueror is more powerful in the sense that it can handle more things - browse the web, use KParts etc. Konqueror is for people who like this approach, Dolphin a general (but still, in my opinion, powerful) file manager for everyone.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article yet. Everything I've written is only my interpretation.

>> "you're too stupid to use Konqueror; here, have a go with Dolphin".
> Perhaps because that is what we were told. No?

No, it was what the lot's of people said, except the developers themselves. The Dot has seen a lot of reactive complaints to the announcement; how "Dolphin" was missing features and that implied KDE was going towards GNOME's direction. Stuff like KIO support was not in Dolphin, tabs and treeviews were not in Dolphin. Those were valid points, but they missed the fact the developers planned to add those missing parts.. :-/

The truth is Dolphin was a good base to build a better file manager. I really like Dolphin in KDE 4. It looks awesome, works really well, much easier to configure, customize, nicer for the eyes and I can't say I miss anything anymore. That's the Dolphin we're talking about today!! :-) Not the version many still think Dolphin perceive to be. ;-)

I don't know where he's pulling the removal of functionality, or dolphin being more _powerful_ from.

If anything, konqueror's getting more functionality, because many things being developed for dolphin are being applied to konqueror. Dolphin isn't, and never really has been more powerful than konqueror for file management (konqueror has tree-view and split panels, as well as document viewers, a shell, and a ton of other stuff).

> Mr. Byfield says:
> "If you want, you can still use Konqueror as a
> file manager, but much of that functionality has
> been removed, making it a much less cluttered application."
>
> I heard that Konqueror will not be "dumbed down." So either
> he is wrong or it is "dumbed down."

No functionality of Konqueror will be removed for KDE 4.0. Until now David Faure invested a lot of time getting the core libraries for Konqueror and Dolphin in shape for KDE 4.0. He did not have that much time yet for Konqueror, but the Dolphin KPart (which can be embedded in Konqueror) has already been written and (at least basically) integrated. As David is an incredible good programmer I have no doubt that he will bring Konqueror in good shape for KDE 4.0 :-)

So the file management part of Konqueror will keep its tab functionality, its unlimited split functionality, its custom context menu, ... - all the things why people love Konqueror. If one minor thing would not make it into KDE 4.0 (we are all human), we'll do our best for getting this into KDE 4.1.

> I have used Dolphin. It may be easier to use for your average user.
> Though I still consider Konqueror "more powerful." I think that
> the KDE devs have decided to keep Konqueror for "power users"
> and Dolphin for "average users."

I fully agree that Konqueror is more powerful. Still this "Konqueror is for power users" and "Dolphin for average users" does not hit the point in my opinion... My vision of Dolphin was that it is a simple to use and fast file manager. With "simple to use" I never meant "drop all features that might confuse average users". E. g. we integrated an embedded console in Dolphin, which for sure is not something for a typical "average user".

But I differ between features that clutter the UI and make Dolphin less simple to use and features that are non-intrusive to the UI. The embedded console part or the tree view panel are features which are (nearly) non-intrusive and off per default. They can be turned on by selecting one menu entry and are useful for a lot of users out there. I also investigated a lot of time that the available features in Dolphin are highly configurable, so that the features can be adjusted to the needs of a broad user group (not only "average users").

What I want to say is that I intended Dolphin to be a powerful file manager, but never at the costs of simple to use. As Dolphin exports all its file manager capabilities to Konqueror and Konqueror can do do a lot of more things too, Konqueror will always be more powerful than Dolphin. Still this does not mean that Dolphin is a file manager for "dummies" ;-)

Konqueror and Dolphin are just 2 different approaches sharing a lot of things internally. I think the nice thing is that people can chose between the 2 applications no matter whether they see themselves as "power users" or "average users"...

>> The embedded console part or the tree view panel are features which are (nearly) non-intrusive and off per default. They can be turned on by selecting one menu entry and are useful for a lot of users out there.

Careful, or you'll get a bunch of feature requests about tabs in Dolphin again. ;)

Talking about feature requests, I have an idea I want to share. Just need to make a mockup when I get my stationary back (still stuck with Photoshop, unfortunately).

I think the reason people get confused about the difference between KDE 4 and KDE 4.0 is that 4 and 4.0 generally mean exactly the same thing. I expect that if we called a pre-release of KDE 4.0, KDE 4.00, it would also confuse people.

And at the risk of being annoying, I love Dolphin, despite being a 'power user'. The only thing I miss is tabs. (And I keep pressing Ctrl-N to get a new window and it makes a new folder, but I guess I can at least configure that.)

I have one question :
If I have a Dolphin window opened on a directory, a Konqueror window opened on an FTP site, can I drag a file from Dolphin to Konqueror and upload this file directly? The same with FISH, SMB, etc? And download the same way too?

Well, I don't know if I'm a power user or not, but while I was dubious at the beginning, I am now looking forward to see Dolphin in action.
For actually simple reasons : I like to have file manager windows rather small and I like to have open new windows in windows, not tabs. On the contrary, I like to open web pages on new tabs and I like my browser to open with a large window.
Somewhat, I've never managed to get Konqueror to handle both ways properly, and having two different apps will hopefully fix it for me.

Now I'm all for using the best approach for the job at hand but I think using 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) different ways of implementing very similar functionality is just inconsistent and unnecessarily confusing. Why not unify sidebar-tabs and make an option in kcontrol so we can choose our favorite solution for all KDE apps?